This worked example belongs to the placement guarantee hub, which covers the inventory before an ATS migration. Here the job is narrower: walk one hard case from start to finish and show why its sequence is evidence.
The placement and the promise (Illustrative)
Fictional, written for this page; no real firm, client or person is described. A 180-person IT staffing firm fills a direct-hire network engineer role for a regional insurer. The client agreement carries a 90-day replacement-or-credit clause: if the hire leaves within 90 days of the start date, the firm either finds a replacement or credits part of the fee.
The hard case is easy to recognize in outline. The role changes after the candidate starts. The client moves the new engineer onto different work, the engineer quits inside the window, and the client asks for its fee back. Whether the clause still applies depends on two things: what was agreed when the job was ordered, and what actually changed afterwards. Both must be on the record for anyone to judge the outcome later.
Seven steps from job order to fee credit
| Day | What happened | Record it leaves | System | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -21 | Job order opened: network engineer, on-site, one data center | Job order with requirements and fee terms | Applicant tracking system | Account manager |
| 0 | Candidate starts | Placement with start date and guarantee terms | Applicant tracking system | Search consultant, approved by back office |
| 3 | Start date found keyed as day 2, corrected to day 0 | Placement change request and its approval | Applicant tracking system | Back office |
| 38 | Client moves the hire to a 24/7 on-call rotation across three sites | Hiring manager's email; consultant's call note | Email, candidate notes | Search consultant |
| 71 | Engineer quits, citing the rotation | Client notice; exit call note | Email, candidate notes | Account manager |
| 74 | Client claims a full refund under the guarantee clause | Claim email; case opened | CRM | Account manager |
| 88 | Firm offers a 50% fee credit; client accepts | Decision memo; credit note | CRM, accounting | Operations director |
Who decided what, and on which record
Four decisions shaped the outcome. Each was made by a different person and captured in a different place.
- Back office, day 3: correct the start date. Small, but it fixes the day the 90-day window opens, and a two-day slip would have shifted where the departure fell against that window. Bullhorn's own support material says wrong start dates are a frequent slip at creation and routes later edits through an approved change request. Here that request is the proof of which date the clock really ran from, signed off by someone other than the recruiter.
- Client, day 38: change the role. Not the firm's decision, but the firm's search consultant heard about it and wrote a call note. That note, plus the hiring manager's email, is the only evidence the job moved away from the one ordered.
- Account manager, day 74: open a case. Turning an angry email into a tracked claim is what makes the dispute findable years later.
- Operations director, day 88: settle at 50%. The memo states the reasoning: the clause covered the role as ordered, a material change after start shifted the position, and a partial credit preserved the relationship. The credit note in accounting references the placement.
Why day 38 carries the case
Remove the day 38 row and the outcome looks arbitrary: a hire left inside 90 days and the firm paid only half. Restore it and the compromise reads as a reasoned judgment about a changed role. Yet that row is the weakest in the chain. It lives in email and a free-text note, it names the engineer but may not name the placement, and it is the record most likely to be lost when a recruiter leaves or an ATS is replaced. The day 3 approval is a close second: lose it and the window's opening day becomes a matter of opinion.
That sequence (promise, event, claim, checked outcome) is what makes the history interesting for training and evaluating AI systems on real work: a model has to read terms, notice the change that matters and reach a defensible decision, and the firm's own record shows what an experienced operations director actually decided. How evaluation sets built from professional tasks are described is covered in what GDPval is. The same pattern appears outside staffing; the logistics exceptions guide shows it for shipments.
How to recognize the same case at a client
You do not need to see a single record. Ask the operations director, and listen for these signals:
- "We have a claims tag, or a case type, for placement guarantee claims." Claims are findable, which means years of disputes can be counted.
- "Start corrections go through change requests." The window's opening date has a history, not just a value. A guide to exporting from one widely used staffing platform covers the wider placement history.
- "Consultants log role changes after start." Even an inconsistent habit means some day-38 rows survive.
- "The ops director writes up every disputed refund." Decision memos turn outcomes into reasoning.
- "Credits reference the placement." The outcome can be tied back to the promise. A fractional CFO for staffing agencies is often the person who knows how credits are booked.
Two or three of these together suggest a firm whose dispute history is worth describing in an introduction. To see how the records join across systems, read the system map for placement guarantee disputes.
Qualification: records, owners and what stays open
The records in this case are job orders, placements and change requests (back office), call notes and emails (search consultants and account managers), claim cases (account management) and decision memos and credit notes (operations and finance). The operations director is the natural sponsor; the tree for placement guarantee approvals shows who can approve a licensing discussion. Partners never ask for or handle the records; discovery stays at metadata level.
An introduced firm needs 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded), a documented operating history, rights to license and an authorized contact. Companies in the U.S., Canada and the EU qualify, as do companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, South Africa, Latin America, the UAE and Saudi Arabia when at least 90% of the data is in English. Under the EU GDPR, Article 4(1) treats any information relating to an identified or identifiable person, including a name or an identification number, as personal data, so the placed engineer's details need care. Client confidentiality, candidate privacy, de-identification, buyer interest and any offer stay unknown until SourceX's rights review. SourceX licenses approved business data directly from companies for AI training and evaluation and manages the agreement, rights review, data preparation, delivery and payout.
Next step
Refer a company. Earn up to $100,000. Default reward: 25% of Actual Supplier Payout, capped at $100,000 cumulatively per referred company. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
If a staffing client can show the day-38 kind of record next to its claims and credits, register as a partner, check the firm against who qualifies and read the program terms before introducing its operations director.